Conserving endangered animals is a hot topic today. I'm wondering what it was like in the past. I emboldened the interesting part of my question for if you don't want to read about Maldova.
I was reading about Maldova (a little landlocked country that I had never heard of until tonight), and the origin of the name stems from some myth about a dog named Maldova who chased an aurochs until it drowned in a river. The dog's handler named the river after his dog. So I read about aurochs, and this is the interesting part.
"The aurochs ... is an extinct type of large wild cattle that inhabited Europe, Asia and North Africa. It is the ancestor of domestic cattle. The species survived in Europe until the last recorded aurochs died in the Jaktorów Forest, Poland in 1627.
This is a quote from the Wikipedia article about aurochs. I know that Japan took extensive measures to protect their forests in the past. What was animal conservation like in the past?
I'm no historian, but my general understanding is that although there was various laws regarding wildlife protection, real measures were started in earnest (at least in the US, I can't speak to elsewhere) in the late 1800s and early 1900s, primarily regarding the protection of birds. Around this time, the fashion of the day relied heavily on plumage from exotic birds. The demand was staggering:
A single 1892 order of feathers by a London dealer (either a plumassier or a milliner) included 6,000 bird of paradise, 40,000 hummingbird and 360,000 various East Indian bird feathers. In 1902 an auction in London sold 1,608 30 ounce packages of heron (including the great heron and egret varieties) plumes. Each ounce of plume required the use of four herons, therefore each package used the plumes of 120 herons, for a grand total of 192, 960 herons killed.
Alarmed by the growing near and total extinction of many species of birds, the Society for the Protection of Birds was founded in 1889 in Europe. They worked heavily to discourage the consumption and demand for plumage, but also worked to get laws in place. In the US, the newly created Audubon Society pushed The Lacey Act, which was passed in 1900 and prohibited " interstate commerce in wildlife protected by state statute." (By this time several states already had laws in place to protect birds, so this law stopped people from transporting plumage to states that had no such laws). The Act ended most of the commercial plume trade in Native American birds. In 1903, Roosevelt created the first wildlife refuge in the nation, Pelican Island National Park, in an effort to protect egrets and other birds.